Rise of connected homes raise security concerns

Jennifer Jolly

Special for USA TODAY

Analysts say we'll have 50 billion things connected to the Internet within the next five years. Everything will be connected, from your car to your cat, your bathroom to your bike helmet. Sounds cool, right?

But where is all this data going and being stored? When you have cameras everywhere — including the fridge and bathroom mirror — who can potentially see you, your kids, your entire life? Who is protecting you in this exploding Internet of Things?

That was one of the biggest questions rattling around my head as I wandered through the equivalent of 35 football fields of gadgets and new technology at CES this year. It's always cool to see what tech companies are coming up with. I mean, who doesn't want a pot that stirs itself, or a robot to bring you the meal your 3D printer just whipped and that you cooked from an app on your smartwatch? But how many Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled electronics can we connect to the cloud before we're just putting our personal security at risk?

All of the information generated by these crafty pieces of smart-everythings is going somewhere, and that means that someone is probably already working on a way to exploit it. Hackers have already taken control of home appliances, medical devices like insulin pumps, gaming consoles, and even baby monitors. In one case, someone hacked an Internet-connected camera and used it to scream obscenities into a baby nursery.

"New things are scary, without a doubt," Keith Shank, Director of Ericsson North America's Advanced Technology Labs told me from the showroom floor, where the company showed off some of the work they're doing to both detect and stop smart-home security breaches.

"We're working with [other companies] to create a truly secure back-end cloud concept.The cloud isn't just about storage, it's about making secure connections for everyone and everything around you. How do you find when people have breached it? How do you find what data they've breached? How do you keep that breach from happening again? We have to have the security, we have to have the knowledge of how to fix things. For people to trust new technology, they need to be able to know it's safe and secure for their use."

While Ericcson works on the back-end, there are a many other companies working to create new gadgets that can keep an eye on your house and your privacy. "We see the future being personal, where you will be the password to your devices," said ArcSoft's Caroline Tien-Spalding from CES, where the company unveiled new Face Recognition for Simplicam, its smart-home security camera. Tien-Spalding says we should expect to see more of our gadgets using our own faces, eyes, and fingerprints, to lock-in our security. "Eventually smart devices with gateways — think your smartphone now — will be the point of access. We believe imaging intelligence, which drives things like facial recognition, and your unique three-dimensional facial features could literally be the key."

Bitdefender's Box is another new gadget debuting this month. This small white router-looking box ($199, then $99 a year) keeps a constant eye on the data going into and out of your home, and encrypting it so that it's much harder for anyone to steal. It's kind of like a little cyber security guard who patrols your digital home 24 hours a day.

With home tech getting smarter every day — and the risks multiplying along the way — it's nice to know that there's a few companies out there keeping their head in the clouds so we don't have to.